Poet confesses 'insufferable shame of being a Turk'

March 17, 2014 - 17:43 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net - Paper Boats of Poetry website published an article “The Insufferable Shame of Being a Turk” by Turkish poet Serkan Engin.

“I am a socialist Laz poet from Turkey. My mother is Turkish so my mother tongue is Turkish, but I prefer to consider myself as a “Laz” like my father's ancestors, because I am ashamed of my Turkish ancestors from my mother's side of the family. I refuse to consider myself as a “Turk”, because my Turkish ancestors were perpetrators of genocides at the end of the Ottoman Empire and at the beginning of the Turkish Republic. 1,500, 000 Armenians were brutally murdered by Turkish and Kurdish people under the orders of Ottoman generals. Turks and Kurds have killed their own neighbours, raped their little girls, burned alive little children and women and grabbed the Armenians’ money and properties. Also thousands of Assyrians and Chaldeans had been murdered in their own homelands like Armenians by the Ottoman government during this genocide period,” Engin says in his article.

“A terrible genocide had to be committed against the Armenians. I accept the reality of the Armenian Genocide as the son of a Turkish mom and I am ashamed of my mother's ancestors, of my Turkish ancestry This is the shame of the Turks and Kurds. This is the shame of Turkish History, also a shame for the Kurdish people. This is a blot on human history. I apologize to all the Armenian victims in the name of humanity and kneel down in front of your pain even though I had no participation in this violence personally,” the poet said.

“Unfortunately, this is not the only genocide the Turks have been involved in. Also 353,000 Pontic Greeks had been brutally murdered in 1919 in Anatolia by the order of Mustafa Kemal, the Ottoman General of the Committee of Union and Progress who would become the founder of the new Turkish Republic. This new republic is the continuation of the old racist Committee of Union and Progress, having the same mentality.”

“These are not the only crimes of my Turkish ancestors. From the beginning of their history, Turks were trouble makers to all those near them. Turks have lived by grabbing the neighbouring lands, killing many people, raping their women, making their children slaves, grabbing their country and money for 2000 years.”

“Dear friends, they can arrest me and put me in jail because of these explanations or a racist can shoot me on the street, but my conscience and intellectual ethics make me obligated to shout out the truth to the whole world. I will speak the truth till my last breath,” Engin said.

The Armenian Genocide (1915-23) was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterized by massacres, and deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of deaths reaching 1.5 million.

The majority of Armenian Diaspora communities were formed by the Genocide survivors.

Present-day Turkey denies the fact of the Armenian Genocide, justifying the atrocities as “deportation to secure Armenians”. Only a few Turkish intellectuals, including Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk and scholar Taner Akcam, speak openly about the necessity to recognize this crime against humanity.

The Armenian Genocide was recognized by Uruguay, Russia, France, Lithuania, the Italian Chamber of Deputies, majority of U.S. states, parliaments of Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Belgium and Wales, National Council of Switzerland, Chamber of Commons of Canada, Polish Sejm, Vatican, European Parliament and the World Council of Churches.